Gary Johnson for President

December 28 marked an important day in Libertarian Party history — the day that the party gained a presidential candidate, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, capable of smashing its previous high in any presidential election, and perhaps even making the LP marginally relevant for once (or, at least, gaining the party's second-ever electoral vote). Johnson as standard bearer would be something of a perfect storm for the LP — which, though unavoidably also a tempest in a teapot, would nonetheless make a bigger splash than the Party has ever been capable of before.

Flash back to the last election cycle. No, go back two, to 2004, when the LP, still reeling from Harry Browne’s machinations, nominated a complete unknown as its presidential candidate. The list of “missed opportunities by the Libertarian Party” is a long and tragicomic one, but surely the choice of Michael Badnarik must be at or near the top: in an election evenly split between the military-statist Bush and the eco-statist Gore, the LP could’ve had a healthy cut of the excluded middle — but Badnarik’s was not the name to draw those voters.

In 2008, with that swing-and-a-miss behind them, the LP whiffed with the opposite approach, nominating a big name who was a, shall we say, imperfect fit with party ideals. I’m not one to deny the place of pragmatism in politics, but the man who authored the Defense of Marriage Amendment and fervently prosecuted the Drug War was a strange choice for the supposed party of freedom. No matter how hard he pushed his Road to Damascus narrative, a large chunk of the LP base (namely, donors and state and local party poobahs) was never going to buy into his campaign.

As a result, Bob Barr’s failure was utterly predictable — the rift in the party in 2008 was clear for all to see — but more to the point, just as utterly inevitable. In Barack Obama, the Democrats found a candidate who could reach out to the same undecideds the LP tries to make its own — those looking to cast a vote in dissent, anything so long as it has nothing to do with the party in power. Empty as we now know (or always knew) his promises of “Hope” and “Change” to be, they were nonetheless effective in closing off any change the Libertarians had of playing a role in the last cycle.

All of which is to say, the LP screwed up by getting its candidates backward — if anything, the off-the-ranch Republican with name recognition would have fared much better in 2004, serving as an alternative to two unpalatable statists. Meanwhile, 2008 would have been the time to run an outsider, someone who could elucidate a libertarian point of view, in the rare moments he (or she — vide Mary Ruwart) was called upon to do so.

But in 2012, the LP has the opportunity to pitch a candidate to an electorate seemingly sick of the whole process. Obama’s broken promises, aforementioned, have alienated a small but substantial portion of his base — those who cannot overlook our nation’s ongoing, unnecessary, and inhumane foreign wars; the continued attacks on the constitutional rights of the citizenry; the all-enveloping secrecy in which the government carries on its affairs; the gulag archipelago we are building up in our modern prison system . . . in short, all those left-leaning pundits and bloggers not in step with the all-conquering Obama line foisted upon us hourly by the power-loving, bootlicking establishment media outlets.

Who will these people turn to? Certainly not the Republican Party, at least not once Ron Paul again is defeated by, or cedes way to, a far inferior challenger. Despite moments in the sun for the laughable Herman Cain and the odious Newt Gingrich (not to mention Rick Perry’s campaign, brought to you by Tom of Finland), this nomination has from the first been Mitt Romney’s to lose. Only trouble is, Romney and Obama are, as The Root recognized long ago, nearly the same person. And more recently, one of Romney’s chief advisors was heard loudly rattling the saber for war with Iran — something that seems increasingly inevitable whichever party ends up with its finger on the button.

Hence, there is a chance that an experienced, eloquent Libertarian Party candidate — one capable of making, forcefully, the case against war, whether against other nations that pose no threat to us, or against those of our own citizens whose only crime is to ingest federally frowned-upon substances — could steal a sizable chunk of the vote, and not just from the college crowd (who, as we all know, don’t vote — I should know: I am one still). And that’s where Gary Johnson comes in. He’s an experienced pol who has the benefit of gaining his experience in a somewhat out-of-the-way state, allowing him both to get away with more than he might elsewhere (witness the in-progress crucifixion of Chris Christie in New Jersey), and to get raves from both Right and Left at different times for his handling of budgets and various other crises.

Additionally, Johnson has a legitimate beef with the presidential process, which effectively killed his campaign before it had hardly started by the simple expedient of refusing to let him speak alongside other candidates. By switching over to the LP, Johnson can present himself as a true outsider, one unbeholden to the major-party machines and their media purse-chihuahuas. His strongest issue, the legalization of marijuana (and decriminalization of other presently illegal drugs), will find supporters all along the political spectrum, especially those who for some reason expected Obama to live up to promises to back off medical dispensaries, rather than double down on the persecution. And he is glib enough (and has the voting record, besides) to avoid the typical traps laid down for third-party candidates: disaster management, education and child safety, national security. Likewise, he lacks the baggage some others do — most particularly, he has no history of orgazinational racism or anti-gay bias in his past. And — though this ought to be by far the least important thing about him — at 58 and in good shape, he remains telegenic and does not come off as a coot or a crank.

To close, I note that this is not an endorsement, either for Liberty or for myself, personally. It is, instead, a recommendation. If the Libertarian Party wishes to be relevant in this cycle, then it should gather round Johnson early on, kick the fundraising into gear, and come May’s national convention, launch his candidacy with as much money and PR as can be mustered. If, instead, the LP’s members wish to continue as they always have, then they should quibble and cavil and play up faults in Johnson’s record, and ensure that he is hobbled heading into the general election.

The choice is there, and with it a rare opportunity. But with things finally breaking the LP’s way, what remains to be seen is whether the party is capable of taking advantage.

From Ayn Rand to . . . Edward Abbey?

Libertarians of a certain age, when reflecting on their political odyssey, usually invoke Ayn Rand as the source of their epiphany — in spite of the fact that Rand herself repudiated the libertarian movement and labeled her philosophy Objectivism. Most libertarians weren’t persuaded: they continued the one-way lovefest, though many were beginning to feel embarrassed by the dogmatism, stubborn intransigence, absence of warmth or empathy, and cultishness of her aptly-nicknamed “collective.” Gagging on Objectivist correctness, Jerome Tuccille, a former Wall Street Journal writer and libertarian child of the Goldwater campaign, hastened the split between Rand and many of her erstwhile followers with the publication of his 1971 memoir, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, in which he lampooned Objectivists as zombie sycophants. Nevertheless, Rand remains the most influential libertarian of the twentieth century, though less and less so as more varied paths to libertarianism open.

Libertarians are radicals. Randian libertarians have especially radical expectations of the world. Relying on a philosophy so internally consistent that its dots nearly connect themselves, they continue to proselytize, believing that exposure to self-evident tenets will result in massive conversions. Next to the Bible, Rand’s philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged remains one of the best-ever-selling books in English. But while the Bible continues to make converts, particularly of the fundamentalist sort, Rand’s oeuvre is not nearly as successful.

Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize, on a smidgen of evidence from the Human Genome Project and other sources, that both religious inclination and political persuasion have genetic bases. Perhaps. On the other hand, I place libertarians smack dab in the middle of the left-right continuum (as does the "world’s smallest political quiz") — and there is some truth to that.

My father, founding CFO of what would later become AIG, admired Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — its attempt at eradicating poverty. My mother had favored Richard Nixon over John Kennedy — despite the fact that she was a Catholic. Before she died, she’d become a staunch Reagan supporter, despite the fact that she was opposed to the death penalty. Though both had read Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s other major novel, The Fountainhead, neither perceived them as particularly political.Their politically schizoid children became, in turn: a conservative turned Obama-backer with vague New Age inclinations (oldest brother); a seeker settling into religious-right Republicanism (older sister); a liberal attorney who later found Christ and conservatism (little sister); and a left-right flirter slouching into moderate libertarianism and radical atheism (myself). Go figure. It seems that unless chaos theory is resorted to, political hegiras are often unpredictable and the motives behind them inscrutable.

* * *

At first, Ayn Rand didn’t charm me.

Recently graduated from college, I’d joined a group of 14 friends who proposed to kayak the 600-mile length of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula — at the time, a nearly preposterous undertaking considering that back in 1972, kayaking, as a sport, didn’t really exist in the US, and Baja’s infrastructure consisted of widely dispersed fishing villages connected by 4-wheel-drive tracks. We resorted to ordering kayaks from Germany, carrying our own essentials, and fishing for protein.

It was almost more than we could handle. Averaging, at first, only ten miles per day because of winds, contrary currents, swell and some of the highest tides in the world, most of the group abandoned the expedition at Santa Rosalia, Baja’s midway mining town. Still, four of us decided to forge on. Those who departed left us whatever we could use to aid our success. Except for Tek. He insisted that we pay — if not market price, at least something,for his dry noodles, crackers, peanut butter, chocolate bars, rusty lures, and battered reading material. I stared at him incredulously and asked, “Why?”

Unless chaos theory is resorted to, political hegiras are often unpredictable and the motives behind them inscrutable.

Now, on any long expedition, reading material is essential. While I had taken John Steinbeck’s Log of the Sea of Cortez, Tek had taken Atlas Shrugged. “Because it’s my stuff and I don’t owe it to you,” he responded, adding that I’d understand once I’d read the book, which he ended up giving to me. I paid him a token price for his offerings but used the book’s pages as fire starters after reading the back-cover blurb. Not only was his arrogance insufferable, but that title seemed a pretentious conceit, and the book’s catch-phrase, “Who is John Galt?” (touted as cutting-edge slang somewhere — I don't remember where) seemed as catchy and pithy as a bad English-speaking foreigner’s attempt at neologising — which is exactly what it was. (Years later, when I finally got around to reading Rand, I appreciated her perspective, one I was already taking to.)

* * *

The strongest formative influences on my political development occurred around puberty. I grew up in Havana, Cuba, the son of a well-to-do capitalist entrepreneur who’d married his Cuban secretary. Not only had he established Cuba’s AIG branch, but he introduced Volkswagen to the island and opened Cuba’s first paper products factory.

In 1960, a year and a half after Castro’s revolution, my family was forced to abandon everything, pack one suitcase each and flee Cuba for Mexico. All of our property was expropriated. Unsure of their next move, our parents placed us children in boarding schools along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where we perfected our English and experienced the American Civil Rights movement up close.

By the time I entered high school, my political consciousness was being forged by the Vietnam draft and the presidential campaign of 1964. The Jesuit high school I attended in Phoenix, Arizona stressed critical thinking and public involvement, going so far as to hold mock Goldwater-Johnson debates for the entire student body. English classes included up-to-date reports and discussions of the goings-on in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, interspersed — at one time — with an in-depth study of Emerson’s “On Self Reliance,” a curious albeit insightful juxtaposition. I rooted for Barry, an unpretentious straight-shooter, with a solid grasp of the issues. But it wasn’t just his political values that attracted me. When I heard he’d mooned a censorious group that objected to the carousing at one of his campaign parties, he became my hero.

My friend EB and I decided to get involved. He joined YAF (Young Americans for Freedom) and introduced me to the John Birch Society’s nearby American Opinion Bookstore, which enabled me to buy and read None Dare Call it Treason. EB was sharp as a scimitar, a whiz at Latin and classical Greek, and unbeatable in debate, with a vocabulary that rivaled William F. Buckley’s. Together we joined the Model UN, a national high school mock UN project, where we hoped to be assigned to represent some important country — like France or Canada. We were assigned Ghana. Knowing nothing about Ghana — and just a tad disappointed — we decided to meet with President Kennedy’s ex-ambassador to that country, William P. Mahoney, who happened to live in Phoenix. Ambassador Mahoney was kind enough to grant us an interview just days before the conclave. True to form — and with EB’s command of parliamentary procedure — we brought little Ghana to the forefront by tabling some outrageously radical proposal in the General Assembly. That really got things going.

Later, I put together a presentation, complete with maps and photographs, on the Cuban Revolution and offered it to schools and interested groups. Nothing drives home an abstract news event to an elementary school audience like having a high schooler — only a few years older — recount how a revolution affected his family. Adult audiences, likewise, listened rapt and incredulous at what the kid lived through, always imagining the worst.

We brought little Ghana to the forefront by tabling some outrageously radical proposal in the General Assembly.

I was driven. Already president of my class, I decided to run for the Student Body Council — first for treasurer, then later for president. My libertarian inclinations were evident in my platform. I reasoned that since Student Body funds belonged to the students, my job was to maximize revenues and then return them to the students. The assembled student body had never heard such logical populism before. I could barely get through my speech for all the hollering and clapping, while the faculty members grinned nervously, wondering what their democracy had wrought. I won overwhelmingly. My opponent, Dick Mahoney (son of Ambassador Mahoney), who was later to become Arizona’s secretary of state and a Democratic candidate for governor, never stood a chance.

I kept my promise. To maximize Student Body revenues, I got the administration to fire the snacks and refreshments purveyor for varsity football games and, with a small crew of volunteers working out of the back of a pick-up truck outfitted with counters, ice chests and a till, took over the concession. The money poured in. Unable to convince the administration to issue rebate checks for each and every student at the end of the year, I decided to throw a big party with the funds. Between prom and graduation celebrations, I got Linda Rondstadt and the Stone Poneys — who’d just released their hit single “Different Drum” — to put on a dance-concert for the combined student bodies of my own Brophy Prep and our twin neighbor girls’ school, Xavier High.

* * *

EB and I ended up at different colleges, where we both broadened our horizons: me, in northern Arizona where I discovered girls, drugs, and outdoor adventure sports such as alpinism and kayaking, and acquired a knowledge base that instilled confidence in my developing opinions; EB at the University of Virginia, where he discovered boys, the law, and the power of big government to set certain injustices right. At first, EB was up to his old tricks. He and several right-wing buddies planned a takeover and subversion of the U of V branch of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), a firebrand, radical left-wing organization that, by 1969, was already falling apart. As he recounts,

“Our strategy was to have some of ‘our people’ attend and cause a disruption and dissention. I, then, would emerge as the voice of reason. The ‘disruptors,’ as the plan called, made impassioned speeches, attacked me viciously (of course, we all reconnoitered later for a few beers to celebrate our triumph), and then called for a massive walkout. Many people followed them. Of course, that meant that the people left in the room would be easily convinced to elect me as their leader. (Others of my ‘planning committee’ remained to make and second the nomination.) From a tactical perspective, it was very successful. The local newspaper ran an article about ‘Young Turk EB.’ After that, I did nothing. I never attended another SDS meeting. The joy was in formulating and executing our plan. We had no intention of going further.”

While at the University of Virginia, EB (with his gay, black roommate) discovered that his tastes ran counter to the norm. Appalled at the social treatment his new friend was subjected to, EB came to the conclusion that it was only through the federal government’s efforts that racial bigotry would ever begin to be eradicated in as short a time as it ultimately was. So he pursued law, a skill that, by the time he passed the bar, he used to advocate gay rights. Today he describes himself as an anti-establishmentarian.

But I was still torn between Right and Left: on the one hand, debating the merits of Nixon’s Vietnam peace plan with fellow Prescott College students Tom and Randy Udall, scions of the Stewart and Morris Udall political dynasty (Tom is now US Senator from New Mexico); and on the other hand, convincing prospective conservative donors such as the Adolph Coors Trust and nascent Goldwater Institute (not today’s Goldwater Institute) that the small, private, liberal arts “hippie” college I was attending was worth supporting. I’d been handpicked for this PR fundraising job by the college’s president as an example of the caliber of student the college was training for "tomorrow’s" leadership role in society — in spite of my Mohawk hair-do, sometimes flamboyant dress, VW van pimpmobile, and of course my outspokenness.

At the trial, Sam defended himself by arguing that "it wasn't criminal damage, it was historic preservation." The jury acquited him after deliberating for 25 minutes.

The outdoor adventure sports that Prescott College offered as an alternative to the more traditional football, baseball, and basketball at other colleges instilled self-reliance and initiative. They also imbued a passion for the natural environment and its wild places that, over the years, has only grown stronger for me. But it was the academic pursuits that were truly formative, intellectually. I majored in anthropology. Not your garden variety, Samoan-kinship-and-Arunta-fertility studies, but "processual" archaeology, at the time a new, cutting-edge approach to history that attempted to explain the nature and fabric of civilization.

While traditional archaeology collected potsherds, studied changes in art motifs, and concentrated on dating and categorizing sites, processual archaeology studied human adaptation — mostly technological — to changing environmental conditions and increasing population densities. Its corollary in cultural anthropology is known as the "ecological" approach (without the ideological baggage that term carries in common parlance). The specific question that gripped me was, “Why did the people who would become the American Indians, initially a homogenous population at the time of the Bering Straits crossing, develop high civilizations in the Andes and Mexican highlands but remain hunters and gatherers or incipient agriculturalists in the Great Basin and Amazon rain forests?” Today the synthesis this approach yields to the study of humanity is probably best — albeit only partially — exemplified by Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and its sequel Collapse, and given more scholarly exposition in the works of Karl Wittfogel, Leslie White, Gordon Willey, Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, among others.

One elementary conclusion from the "New Archaeology" was the correlation that government power and control increases as population densities thicken and civilization becomes more technologically complex. However, correlation is not cause and effect — much less destiny — and, though the association of the two makes intuitive sense at some level, to this incipient libertarian the challenge was to analyze and discover just how much government denser and more complex societies actually required.

* * *

After graduate school I became a Mother Earth News-subscribing, back-to-the-land homesteader on a 160-acre parcel of rural Arizona land where I built my own energy-efficient home (powered by a wind generator), raised cattle, and grew a garden and orchard. I earned money doing archaeological environmental impact studies, building homes and doing some outdoor guiding. My wife made cowboy shirts and managed the local commercial truck garden. It was then that I discovered the Libertarian Party, through Karl Hess’ seminal article The Death of Politics, Roger McBride’s A New Dawn for America, and one of David Nolan’s local screeds. My wife and I both joined and decided to become politically active.

Our nearest municipality, Chino Valley, had just hired its first town manager, deciding that its exponential growth was just too much complexity for its traditional mayor-and-council government. Academically trained professional town managers often have a statist bent. Our newly hired statuesque blonde bureaucrat (with hair tickling the dimples on the backside of her knees), prided herself on her ability to extract state and federal funds through her skill at writing grant applications. Nonetheless, she was young and hip, and found us kindred souls. She hired us to write a pamphlet guide to local government for local citizens, a task we tackled with a libertarian bent. Additionally, she sponsored an Economic Development Committee to attract businesses to Chino Valley. I joined, though as something of a Trojan horse. Our little town wanted a supermarket, such as a Safeway, to locate nearby while I — not averse to the new facility — was afraid our committee members would sell their souls by imposing liens on the taxpayers (such as tax breaks for the chain), issuing industrial revenue bonds, or resorting to any number of other unfair competitive practices — or worse.

He pounced on my uncertainty about eliminating the police force, asking, “What crimes have the police ever prevented?”

1982 was a threshold year for the Arizona Libertarian Party. The popular five-term Republican Congressman, Sam Steiger, an outspokenly colorful character, declared his candidacy for governor as a Libertarian. Sam was a rancher, journalist, and Korean War hero who had twice represented Prescott in the state senate. He was plainspoken in the Goldwater mold, had a contagious smile and an outrageous sense of humor. His very public debate with his new party over conscription and his subsequent flip-flop actually helped him; it indicated that he was amenable to reasoned argument and not afraid to admit he was wrong.

When I first met him, at the offices of thePrescott Sun, the newspaper he published (and for which my wife worked), he was wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots, and was chomping on a big, lit cigar. He shook my hand, twisted his head back — as if to get a better perspective to look me over — and baited me with repartee.

“I’m all for the little guy,” he declared, pausing dramatically. “There goes one now!” he blurted in mock surprise, pointing at the floor, and stomping on the spot with an exaggerated goose step.

Sam wasn’t popular with the intelligentsia. He was once stopped by a traffic cop and the verbatim transcript of the exchange appeared as a full-page article in Prescott’s other newspaper, thePrescott Courier. To every polite request from the officer, Sam responded with a “Fuck off” or some other expletive-laden insult or an accusation of harassment. Neither a reason for, nor a conclusion to, the traffic stop was mentioned — absolutely no explanation other than the implication that Sam Steiger was not a fit citizen. Oddly too, the article was accompanied by a large, close-up picture of Sam’s face — apparently snapped from the passenger side — sardonically yet patiently putting up with the ordeal,.

But he was an active citizen. When the City Council erased a mid-block crosswalk connecting the courthouse with the bars on Whiskey Row in downtown Prescott, because a state highway ran concurrent with that street, the citizenry raised holy hell. Sam took the matter into his own hands and personally repainted the white lines. He was arrested and charged with criminal damage and disorderly conduct. At the trial, he defended himself by arguing that "it wasn't criminal damage, it was historic preservation." The jury acquited him after deliberating for 25 minutes.

Sam lost his bid for governor but garnered over 5% of the vote, crossing the magic threshold that gave the Libertarian Party ballot access. It was a sweet defeat. Years later, in 1999, he was elected mayor of Prescott.

* * *

Ballot access electrified Arizona’s Libertarians. State and county chapters organized. Precinct committeemen were appointed, elected or volunteered. I attended my first Yavapai County Libertarian Party meeting — an intense mixture of misfits, cranks, anarchists, hippies, dropouts, and nerds from both Left and Right, kitted up extremely informally (if not outrageously) — all united by instinct, intellect, and outside-the-box thinking.

There, at the meeting, I ran into Mark Davis — a close friend from high school but the last person I thought I’d run into. He recognized me and gave me a warm hug. He was big — solid and powerful (an amazing Charles Atlas-like transformation) — with long and thick, unruly strawberry blonde hair; but still freckled with his distinctive nostril slit, a scar from a tussle with a dog when he was a kid.

The last time I’d seen him was at "24th & Van Buren," Phoenicians’ euphemistic name for Arizona’s hospital for the criminally insane. I’d visited him there when I heard he’d been committed. Sitting cross-legged on the ground across from him in the thrice-fenced outdoor commons, I’d asked him what landed him there. He said he’d killed someone.

I was speechless. Aghast. Though extremely intense, Mark was no murderer. He was a minor, in the nuthouse. Who knows exactly what he meant by “I killed someone”? He could have meant anything from murder to accident to he just felt responsible for someone’s death to . . . who knows? I assumed it had all been an unfortunate accident and that he’d feigned insanity to ease his plight. (If anyone could fool a bevy of psychiatrists, Mark Davis, with his sharp intellect and determination, could.) I didn’t question him further, fearing that covert eavesdropping might pick up our conversation. I didn’t want to blow his cover. I wished him well and promised to visit again, but never got around to it.

It was now apparent that he’d survived the ordeal. We caught up.

Much had happened. In 1969, he had cofounded Terros, an extremely successful — albeit, at the time, controversial (both for its unconventional methods and staff) — crisis intervention program in Phoenix and had received a citation from the mayor for talking a man out of suicide. (Today Terros is a multimillion dollar enterprise that specializes in drug rehabilitation.) He’d also taken up martial arts and become a Sikh. He'd taken to riding a Harley and trolling for rednecks that didn’t like his long hair, beard, and turban, so he could teach them tolerance. Afterward he’d married and was now raising two daughters, whom he supported as a master craftsman, building high-end, lacquered, exotic-wood, shoji-screened cabinets for rich clients in, among other places, Santa Barbara, California. While there, he’d taken up some sort of Maoist revolutionary ideology. Surprised, I asked him if he hadn’t had a bit of a conflict between his political views and his employment. He responded that he was volatile, his thinking was always evolving, and that his convictions followed his conscience. But now, he was a libertarian — and he was raring to act.

Abbey’s point is that compared to industrial magnitude pollution, which kills people and animals, empty cans along a roadway are not only harmless; they provide income for homeless scavengers.

We discussed political philosophy. Mark’s libertarianism burned with the faith of the newly converted — it gravitated toward anarchy. Mine, tempered by experience, was more moderate. He ran down the list of government functions that could be privatized or eliminated. Mark being Mark (and now a libertarian, a species whose propensity to cavil is only exceeded by Marxist theoreticians and Jewish rabbis), pounced on my uncertainty about eliminating the police force, asking, “What crimes have the police ever prevented?”

Mark could go from convivial to confrontational in the flash of a rhetorical comment — eyes popping out, spit flying, face too close for comfort. But I’d grown up with him, liked him, and could calm him by tactfully pointing out that my opinions were provisional, while subtly reinforcing my affection for him. Luckily, the party chairman called the meeting to order. He announced that he was stepping down. He’d taken a political preference test and discovered that he was more conservative than libertarian. The honorable course, he believed, was to resign. The chair of the Yavapai County Libertarian Party was open.

With only a moment’s hesitation, Mark grabbed the baton and volunteered me for treasurer, adding that my clean-cut good looks, conventional attire, and calm demeanor were a necessary face for the party. It was a done deal: he became chairman and I became treasurer.

* * *

Mark had grown up the son of an oilman, bumping around places like Indonesia and Libya. He was precocious and idealistic from the start, with a sharp mind and boundless energy. He had raged in one direction or another since he was a preteen growing up in Phoenix, with his hidebound father ineffectively attempting to corral the boy’s energies with beatings. By the time he was 16, he’d been in and out of so much trouble that he was put in the California Youth Authority’s Los Angeles rehab center for unruly kids. As Dean Kuipers, in his September 1989 Spin article quotes him, “There was a lot of fighting, rapes, attempted rapes. I’m this screwed-up, basically naïve, suburban white kid, and this is right after the Watts riots. I came out of there pretty crazy, pretty wild.” Swearing never to be taken advantage of, he turned to weightlifting, self-defense and extreme endurance.

After reconnecting at the Libertarian Party meeting, we started to hang out together. Mark loved to take long runs in the mountains near Prescott. At sunrise, he’d run barefoot two and a half miles and up 2,000 feet to 7,000-foot Granite Mountain Pass and back, cutting a maniacal figure as he hurtled over rocks, prickly pear cactus, and blazing decomposed granite. I accompanied him once — with shoes. For us, being far from the beaten track, up on a mountain, down on a river, out in the desert or at sea was a meditation, a challenge, and a love affair all rolled into one. At his cabinet shop, he had a "heavy bag," which bore the brunt of his kickboxing workouts or his frustrations, demons that could materialize unpredictably at any time.

In high school, we’d hit it off: he a misfit, me a BMOC (big-man-on-campus). We’d found what we thought was a discarded B-52 fuel tank and decided to convert it into an outrigger canoe — the perfect undertaking for two hyperactive teens uncomfortable with just hanging out. The project was a big deal for a couple of 15-year-olds; it took most of the year. But we worked well together, and by the time I got my driver’s license, we had successfully launched the canoe on nearby Lake Pleasant. After that we drifted apart. During senior year he either left school or was kicked out.

Somehow, something similar happened after a few ill-attended Libertarian Party meetings where no one but me, Mark, and the new party secretary (of whom I retain no memory) showed up. We drifted our separate ways: me, to teach at an Outward Bound-type school in Colorado; Mark, to apply his boundless energy in new, more radical directions.

* * *

When local author Edward Abbey published The Monkeywrench Gang in 1975, it became an instant cult classic — the Atlas Shrugged of the environmental movement. The novel revolves around an unlikely alliance of four wilderness lovers who wage a war of low-tech sabotage — “monkeywrenching,” as they call it — against mineral exploitation and development of all stripes. The group is composed of Seldom Seen Smith, a “jack Mormon”; Dr. Sarvis, a rich, angry surgeon; Bonnie Abbzug, his (of course) gorgeous nurse; and a Neanderthal Vietnam vet named George Washington Hayduke. While “Who is John Galt?” became the catchphrase of Rand’s followers, “Hayduke Lives!”, appeared on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and graffiti — an expression of solidarity with monkeywrenching.

Monkeywrenchers proliferated — not least in Prescott. At our local college, a small group of activists fired up a chainsaw and, in the wee hours of the morning, cut down a new billboard just outside of town. But the novel’s impact was national. As Kuipers recounts,

“In April 1980, Dave Foreman and four other radical environmentalists took a hiking trip in the Pinacate Desert. They had all read about Hayduke and the Monkeywrench Gang, so as they sat in a dark, rural bar in San Luis, Mexico, they weren’t surprised to find themselves creating an organization that would advocate widespread ‘ecotage’ — property damage used to free wilderness areas from the blight of mining, foresting and commercial development. They named the group Earth First! after the premise of biocentrism that John Muir and Aldo Leopold had put forth: Every species on earth has an equal right to exist, the planet is not meant to be exploited, and measures must be taken to assure this. Today [1989], Earth First! has a network of over 50 ‘bureaus’ worldwide guided by project organizers rather than a main office. Edward Abbey’s fiction has become reality.”

Five years later, Foreman published (as both editor and partial author) Earth First!’s field manual, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching — a how-to book that details everything from foiling coyote traps to spiking trees to decommissioning heavy construction equipment to downing power lines.

Sometime between 1983 and 1986, Mark Davis discovered a new cause: saving the earth. He’d later say he was willing to die to prevent the rape of Mother Earth, yet — oddly — was unwilling to join Earth First! formally. Not only was he not much of a joiner; he viscerally disliked Dave Foreman, thinking him a poseur. Later, of course, he’d accept operational funds from him. Mark and the small group of Prescott-area activists that had coalesced for monkeywrenching operations dubbed themselves the Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy (EMETIC), deriving the name from the later-to-be-impeached, car-dealership-owning, hyper-conservative Arizona governor.

John Maynard Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” I changed my mind about this particular government intrusion.

Meanwhile, my environmental consciousness was fine tuning itself. Though I had no patience for Abbey and couldn’t get past the first chapter of The Monkeywrench Gang, one contrarian point he made struck a chord — and he made it in a very Randian manner. In a scene in Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart, a railroad magnate and the novel’s heroine, is driving through endless, pristine forest. She’s terminally bored — until she spots a billboard. Her eyes light up, her lips curl into a smile, all her senses come alive, and she comments on the contrast between nature’s randomness and the billboard, an icon of the creative and purposeful effort of an individual.

Abbey, on the other hand, has one of his characters driving across a stunning Monument Valley-like landscape drinking beer and tossing the empties out the window — a monkeywrencher littering. His point is that compared to industrial magnitude pollution, which kills people and animals, empty cans along a roadway are not only harmless; they provide income for homeless scavengers. It got me to thinking about the difference between environmental aesthetics and environmental fundamentals, such as those with public health consequences, including air pollution — a subject first explored from a free-market perspective by Milton Friedman.

As a sometime land speculator, subdivider, and homebuilder, I faced a few decisions that helped focus my libertarian environmentalism — particularly in regard to zoning. At first I favored underground utilities, and was also instrumental in getting the county to institute a zoning ban on mobile and modular homes — both of these on aesthetic grounds. But when I received a cost estimate for underground utilities versus power poles for one project, I quickly changed my mind: the aesthetics were just not worth the price. The huge difference reflected a much greater expenditure of energy, time, and manpower. Aesthetics would have substantially increased the price of the finished product, thereby making it less affordable to more people. Additionally, underground utilities were costlier to maintain and repair.

One day a neighbor dropped by, worked up into a lather. He informed me that the state was planning to register all our wells with an eye, ultimately, to meter them, measure our water usage, and even charge us for the water from our own wells. My first reaction was outrage. But then the calmer strains of research took over. First, an overview of water policy, in libertarian author Terry L. Anderson’s Water Crisis: Ending the Policy Drought (Cato Institute & The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Then, a reading of the pending legislation.

The long and short of it was that some critical Arizona aquifers were being depleted at an unsustainable rate. And Chino Valley was smack dab in the middle of one of these. As Anderson had clearly pointed out, aquifer extraction is a "tragedy of the commons" phenomenon. His mitigating proposals were right in line with Milton Friedman’s insights, and, to my surprise, so was Arizona’s new law. The new AMA (Active Management Area) designations were meant to monitor water extraction, granting first-come-first-served rights to users in, as it seemed to me, an equitable solution to our homegrown tragedy of the commons. John Maynard Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” I changed my mind about this particular government intrusion.

But it was zoning that, after one contentious, standing-room-only public meeting of the zoning board, really rattled me. One of my new neighbors (who had bought a 10-acre parcel from me) approached me one day requesting support for a zoning variance he was seeking. He was an elderly man of modest means, living out his dream of retiring to a wooded, rural homestead. He proposed to install a mobile home on his lot and live in it while building a log cabin around it to enclose it, thereby saving time, money and interior finishing materials. Even though, when the project was completed, there would have been no trace of a trailer; its invisible existence was still, technically, in violation of the zoning restrictions. Hence the need for a variance.

I agreed to support him.

His petition polarized the neighborhood. Ideological lines were drawn and factions formed, mostly by those whose visceral hatred of mobile homes was an integral part of their identity. Neighbors who had previously been on friendly terms now avoided each other. I breasted my cards: antagonizing people did not yield beneficial results. Since I’d sold most of the lots and helped establish the zoning restrictions, most people assumed I was against the variance.

When news of the sabotage reached the FBI offices in Phoenix, FBI headquarters in Washington, DC ordered an investigation opened immediately.

At the zoning board meeting the room was packed, the tension was thick and the tumult intimidating — particularly for the elderly petitioner and his wife. Visibly shunned by most attendees, they were so nervous that he stared straight ahead, stoic and impassive, clutching his notebook of prepared comments, while his wife stood beside him, cheeks wet with uncontrollable tears.

My heart went out to them. I approached them, shook their hands, encouraged them, sat with them. The meeting was called to order. For most of us, it was our first zoning hearing, so the chairman explained the procedure. First, the petitioners would present their request, along with their reasons for the variance they sought. Afterward, members of the public could offer arguments for or against the proposed variance.

Watching that man kowtow to the zoning board on its elevated dais with the factious audience murmuring hostile comments gave me a glimpse of what ‘struggle’ sessions in Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution must have been like. Though already familiar with the political, philosophical, and economic arguments against zoning (see Land Use Without Zoning by Bernard H. Siegan, 1972 — a libertarian classic), I now became viscerally opposed to the institution.

After the old man presented his case and a dozen antis retorted, I spoke in his favor, surprising myself with such an eloquent supporting argument that the local newspaper quoted me and carried my photo.

All to no avail. The couple’s petition was rejected. I walked them out to their car. It was the least I could do.

* * *

In May 1986, three of the four sets of power lines leading to the Palo Verde nuclear power plant outside Phoenix were shorted with hemp cord and medium-gauge chain. The power plant’s lights flickered, the air reeked of ozone, and the technicians inside the control room scrambled to ensure that the backup generator would kick in. When news of the sabotage reached the FBI offices in Phoenix, FBI headquarters in Washington, DC ordered an investigation opened immediately. It was codenamed THERMCOM.

Though monkeywrenching continued throughout the next year, the FBI had few leads. Until October 5, 1987. That night, someone with a propane torch burned through bolts on several of the metal pylons supporting the chair lift towers at the Fairfield Snow Bowl ski area atop the San Francisco Peaks outside Flagstaff, Arizona. The peaks, the highest point in Arizona and visible for way over 100 miles, are sacred to the Navajo and Hopi Indian tribes living just to the northeast. EMETIC claimed credit.

On June 6, 1988, the FBI got its first break. Ron Frazier, one of the Prescott area eco-activists, became an FBI informant. He’d driven Mark Davis to a Phoenix welding supply store to purchase a torch, regulator, and hoses on September 29, 1987 — only one week before the torching. Unstable and jilted by his ex-lover, Ilse Asplund — who had then become Davis’ lover — he rationalized that he was protecting Ilse and her kids from the dangerous Davis. Mark could be arrogant and condescending and was oblivious to jealousy — traits that did not endear him to Frazier, a drug-addled stoner of modest intellect, once described as being a few neurons short of a full nervous system. The welding supply shop manager identified Mark Davis from a photo lineup. It wasn’t hard, given Mark’s distinctive split nostril.

Suspecting that EMETIC was somehow linked to Earth First!, the FBI assigned Michael Fain, an undercover agent, to infiltrate the group. Over the course of two years Fain, using the alias Mike Tait and the persona of a PTSD’d Vietnam vet, finagled himself into the group through the heartstrings of Peg Millet, half-sister of feminist author Kate Millet, an Earth First! activist and close confidant of Mark Davis. Some would say, later, that he was an agent provocateur. But he never gained the trust of Mark — who suspected he was a plant — until Tait accompanied him on his barefoot Granite Mountain run and “heavy bag” workouts.

In one instance, 28 power poles were cut three-quarters of the way through, and the last one finished off with a hacksaw, downing the entire power line when it toppled with an explosive flare of light.

On Labor Day, 1988, Tait, Millet, and a few other activists, hit the site of the proposed Mt. Graham observatory near Tucson, pulling out survey stakes lining the proposed access road to the observatory. Before the month was out, they struck again, cutting the power poles leading to the Hermit, Pine Nut, and Canyon uranium mines on both the North and South Rims of the Grand Canyon. These mines disgorge thousands of tons of earth with radioactive tailings and release a fine uranium dust into the winds — all on the border of national park land. With the North and South Rim mines being separated by a five-hour drive, EMETIC displayed a greater degree of coordination and synchronization than it had ever been credited with before. The EMETIC people had been particularly creative with their sabotage methods. In one instance, 28 power poles were cut three-quarters of the way through, and the last one finished off with a hacksaw, downing the entire power line when it toppled with an explosive flare of light.

The event was front-page news for days. At the subsequent trial, it was revealed that the FBI had known about the uranium mine strikes but declined to act, hoping that later it could somehow snare Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, whom it considered the ultimate kingpin.

A month later, on October 25, 1988, EMETIC hit the Fairfield Snow Bowl again, this time felling one of the chair lift’s main supports. EMETIC was getting bold. After the operation it sent communiqués to every radio and television station in Northern Arizona, warning the resort concessionaires to stop developing the San Francisco Peaks.

Now they had big plans, plans to do things that would stun the nation: cutting down the transmission lines leading from the Palo Verde (Arizona) and Diablo Canyon (San Luis Obispo, California) nuke plants, and the lines leading to the Rocky Flats atomic weapons facility near Denver. But the group needed a practice run.

The target was a transmission tower that supplied electricity to the Central Arizona Project’s (CAP’s) water-lift station near Wenden, Arizona. The CAP diverted Colorado River water to irrigate central Arizona. The commando team of Mark Davis, Mike Tait, Peg Millet, and Dr. Marc A. Baker, an ill-tempered botanist, was a nearly literal rendition of Abbey’s script.

After nightfall on May 30, 1989, they prepared to strike, with Mark as the ringleader bearing the torch. But so did the FBI — with a full SWAT team of more than 50 agents, H&K MP-5 sub-machine guns, helicopters with night-vision capability, and even bloodhounds. Davis and Baker were captured instantly. Tait disappeared. Peg Millet, 35 years old and a big woman, managed to elude capture, running into the desert, reaching Highway 60, and hitchhiking back to Prescott, over 60 miles away. She was apprehended the next day at work, where she showed up as if nothing had happened. Ilse Asplund, Davis’s girlfriend, and Dave Foreman were also arrested after the fact.

At the three-month-long trial, Gerry Spence, the celebrity attorney, headed the defense team representing Foreman. In a plea bargain, Asplund, Baker, Millet, and Davis pled guilty to one charge, involving about $5,200 worth of damage to the Snow Bowl ski lift. Foreman, who was thought to have funded part of the operations, got probation and a $250 fine and was forced to foreswear monkeywrenching. It was the end of Earth First!’s first incarnation. Baker served six months, while Asplund served one; each was fined $2,000. Millet was sentenced to 3 years and restitution of $19,821. Davis got six years and restitution of $19,821.

“I don’t want my species to die. I don’t want my kids to die. We are in the process of suicide. It’s all legal, but it’s suicide.”

At the sentencing hearing, the prosecutor wanted Davis to be remanded to jail immediately and to serve time without parole. But Davis had his say: “I have stood in front of men with guns and stopped them from beating women. I have stopped robberies. I have gone up a tower and pulled a man away from a 50,000 volt line,” he said, adding: “I don’t want my species to die. I don’t want my kids to die. We are in the process of suicide. It’s all legal, but it’s suicide.” Judge Broomfield was taken with Davis’ grandiloquence and gave him 17 days to report to prison. Furthermore, he gave Davis a sentence that would allow for parole at any time during his jail term.

* * *

In September 1991, four days before Mark reported to serve his time, the Los Angeles Times provided him with an editorial sounding board:

“An intelligent conservative knows some deep truths, including the illusory nature of free lunches and the inadvisability of taking irreversible actions without understanding the consequences. Our behavior is neither intelligent nor conservative . . . Growth by its very nature means an increase in the speed and efficiency of environmental destruction. Anyone who says aloud that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible is ridiculed. Denial has become official policy. . . . If what I and my three colleagues did has no effect other than to further damage an already tattered social contract, then I apologize. That was not the point. I acknowledge the necessity of courts and laws, and accept my prison term. But I am not sorry.”

In the late ’90’s I ran into Mark at a local hardware store in Prescott. He’d served four years of his six-year sentence at the minimum security prison in Boron, California. A severe claustrophobe, he had found the incarceration nearly unbearable — he’d lost 40 pounds in the two months of jail following his arrest — as he had found the separation from his two little daughters. Whatever his faults, Mark was a devoted and loving father.

The same month and year that the Los Angeles Times gave Mark a soapbox, Bill Bradford published my first feature article in Liberty. Ever since, realizing that nudging a left- or right-winger toward the libertarian middle is much more productive than attempting to badger him into libertarian purity, I’ve focused my political energies on writing and teaching, two fields where illiberalism cloaks itself in the language of liberalism — always mindful of the adage that “education is the road from obstinate ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.”

About this Author

Robert H. Miller is a builder, outdoor adventure guide, and author of Kayaking the Inside Passage: A Paddler's Guide from Olympia, Washington to Muir Glacier, Alaska, as well as the forthcoming memoir Closing the Circle: A Memoir of Cuba, Exile, the Bay of Pigs and a Trans-Island Bike Journey, available from Cognitio Books in June 2017.

Adventures and Explanations

December is the month when a slew of movies are released, from family films hoping to warm a few hearts, to independent films hoping for Oscar recognition, to franchise installments hoping to be "the Christmas blockbuster" this year. Ironically, December is also the month when we have the least amount of time for moviegoing. But not to worry! They will still be around in January. Here are two you may want to see.

Both are action thrillers that fit the last category above — new installments in the highly successful Sherlock Holmes and Mission Impossible franchises. Both feature handsome megastars (Robert Downey, Jr. and Tom Cruise), likable supporting characters, sardonic wit, and ample fight scenes with breathtaking risks. And both of this season’s offerings feature arms-dealing villains set on starting a war in order to make a buck.

One works brilliantly. The other falls a little flat.

To understand why one works and one doesn't, a little literary history is in order. When Edgar Allan Poe invented the deductive armchair detective, Auguste Dupin, in 1842, he wisely created a slightly dense sidekick to go along with him and narrate the story. Poe’s unnamed narrator needed to have everything explained to him. Obviously, this narrator represented the unseen audience. We readers were the ones who really needed the explanation, and Dupin kindly and patiently complied, providing a logical account of the proceedings to the narrator, who then provided it to us.

Forty years later, Arthur Conan Doyle patterned his soon-to-be-famous Sherlock Holmes on Poe's Dupin, right down to the deerstalker hat and the Meerschaum pipe. His narrator had a name, Dr. Watson, and Watson became our interpreter within the stories. Rex Stout followed the same pattern, providing Archie Goodwin as the narrator of the great detective Nero Wolfe’s affairs. And so the tradition continued.

Director Guy Ritchie's new interpretation of Holmes lifts him out of Basil Rathbone's meditative moods and puts him back in the field of action, where he started. Doyle's Holmes was a pugilist, sword fighter, magician, martial artist, drug addict, and master of disguise. Downey plays him with unbalanced spunk and daring. (See my review in Liberty, March 2010).

But alas! Ritchie has broken with tradition in an unfortunate way. He has decided in this new installment, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, to make Watson (Jude Law) more an unwilling partner than a narrator. Gone are the patient, patronizing explanations to the dunderheaded Watson of the Rathbone films. Watson now fights side by side with Holmes. As a result, the audience has trouble following the plot, which involves Holmes with a widening array of bad guys and gals. Suspense is suspended, because we can't understand the significance of the various discoveries or characters. A Game of Shadows is an apt subtitle. The story is murky and illegible.

The film sports many exciting fight scenes, but we never quite know why various people are chasing Holmes and Watson. As in the previous episode, Ritchie employs an effective technique of showing Holmes's deductive reasoning by using a dark filter for scenes that take place in Holmes's mind. But fight scenes and funny disguises are not enough to carry a film. I was sadly disappointed by this much-anticipated release.

By contrast, the writers of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol learned their lessons well from Messrs. Poe and Doyle. They employ not one but two likable dunderheads (Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner), both of whom are analysts reluctantly pulled into performing as operatives in the field. Throughout the mission, Ethan (Tom Cruise) must explain to them who the next bad guy is and why they have to go after him. This keeps the audience in the know, and we are ready to continue into the next hair-raising stunt.

And they are hair-raising indeed. Ethan escapes prison, breaking arms and noses along the way. He climbs the outside of a structure over 100 stories high. He catapults into buildings and jumps from level to level in a parking garage. He outruns a dust storm. He never quits.

Then there are the trademark maneuvers we have come to expect in a Mission Impossible film: Jumping onto flying vehicles. Hanging spread-eagled inside a government building. Going rogue because the government has disavowed Ethan yet again. And, of course, Tom Cruise running like the wind through crowded streets, as he has done in nearly every film since The Firm in 1993. Add to this a wittier script than we got in previous MI episodes, and we have a close-to-perfect action thriller.

If you have time on your hands this season, you should see both these films. They’re both fun, despite the bad things I said about one of them. But if you're going to see only one, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is certainly the one to choose.

Seventh Grade Revisited

Junior high was fun. I was not one of the beautiful people — I was a nerd. But I enjoyed being a nerd, liked my geeky friends, and relished the self-discovery of figuring out where I fitted in. And the relief of accepting where I didn’t.

Perhaps that’s a stage we mustn’t miss, however painful it can be. If we don’t go all the way through it, maybe we sort of get stuck there. And if we aren’t willing to accept what we learn about ourselves as teenagers, we may spend the rest of our lives snubbing the icky kids and angling for a seat with the cool kids in the cafeteria.

It’s also possible that nobody makes it entirely through that phase in adolescence. I must admit there were certain aspects of it I had to revisit when I was mature enough to process them as an adult. Coming out as a lesbian was something I couldn’t bring myself to do in the Anita Bryant years, while I was still in school. Coming out of yet another closet — as a libertarian — happened even later.

Libertarian philosophy is enjoying an upsurge these days. Government has become so oppressive, so menacing to nearly every aspect of our lives, that everybody not totally under the spell of statist witchery is giving it a look. That also means it is under attack from those who are under the statist spell. Now that I’m an out-and-proud libertarian, I find myself under attack from many more quarters than I ever was for being gay — especially because I refuse to stay obediently on the gay-leftist reservation.

“Eeeewww,”I often hear, “how can you associate with those libertarians? They don't care about the poor. And they don’t care about morality, either." The latter charge, of course, comes not so much from the Left as from the social Right. Both sides agree that I’ve got cooties; they merely disagree about the sort of cooties I have.

Am I a grumpy Scrooge who doesn’t care if the poor suffer? Or am I a get-naked-and-go-crazy libertine, who thinks people should copulate like bunnies under every bush? I’m not sure how I could possibly be both, as the two don’t necessarily go together according to any logical scheme. But then again, those who desperately lob every bomb they can throw at libertarians don’t seem to need no stinkin’ logic.

There are some libertarians with whom I disagree. I may think they are callous toward those less fortunate, or that they don’t care as much as they should about morality. The hostility some seem to have toward religion grates on this particular devout Episcopalian. But I don’t regard political affiliation as a social clique.

Where did so many people get the notion that they can’t associate — ever — with those with whom they sometimes disagree? That’s the way kids think, but I was under the impression that grownups eventually learned to rise above it. Who said life had to be pleasant every minute of every day, or that we’d never need to work with those we wouldn’t care to play with? I wouldn’t want to sit in the cafeteria with everybody I know. But if I share their convictions on matters of importance to us all, I am willing to work with them to make the world a better place.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes. Or, as the Founder of my faith said, “Those who are not against us are for us."

Those of us who have truly graduated from junior high school understand that we can’t simply go with the flow, that however we were made, and however we got here, we do not exist merely to conform. We have voices so they can be heard. I appreciate that as a libertarian, my voice is being heard. And I appreciate all who will listen — even when they disagree.

Perhaps that’s when it matters most.

About this AuthorLori Heine is a freelance journalist and playwright from Goldwater country. Her work is most often seen in the LGBT Christian magazines Whosoever and The Epistle.

The Christmas Controversy — The Early Years

A Costly Epiphany

A recent article struck my eye as worthy of some comment. It is a story completely ignored in the mainstream media, but fascinating nonetheless.

It reports that Rep. John Mica (R-FL), the very congressman who authored the bill that created the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, is now having second thoughts about his creation. In fact, he now favors dismantling and even privatizing it.

Mica, who heads the House Transportation Committee, is candid in acknowledging that the TSA is now a poster child for the Law of Unintended Consequences. He notes that the agency has metastasized (as government agencies are wont to do). It went from a $2 billion to a $9 billion “enterprise.” And Mica avers with apparent astonishment, “The whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats.”

This, of course, makes one want to ask Mica whether he can name any government program not hijacked by bureaucrats. But I digress.

Mica rates the performance of the TSA collectively as a “D-,” and calls the agency a “fiasco.” It is purely reactive, he notes. It required all of us who fly to take off our shoes after only one man (Richard Reid) tried putting bombs in his shoes. He also notes that the agents who pat us down (or in some cases feel us up) because of the underwear bomber have failed to detect any threats in ten years.

It cost $1 billion to train the TSA’s 62,000 workers. Mica says he thinks that the agency should have only about 5,000 workers, and do what he originally intended it to do: gather intelligence in order to uncover terrorist threats and inform the airlines and airports.

The article rehearses some of the more egregious incidents in the agency’s history. In 2002, when it hired 30,000 screeners, the $104 million it gave a company to train these workers ballooned to $740 million. One executive for the company was paid $5.4 million for nine months’ work. Some recruiting sessions were held at tony resorts in Colorado, Florida, and the Virgin Islands. Hundreds of thousands of bucks were splurged on valet parking, beverages, and cash withdrawals, including $2,000 for Starbucks coffee and $8,000 for elevator operators. (At least the luxury-class people conducting these sessions were big tippers.)

Add to this the fact that for years the agency failed to track lost passes and uniforms, and the fact that screeners have been arrested for stealing the jewelry, computers, cameras, cash, and credit cards of travelers, and the fact that in 2006, screeners at two of the biggest airports were unable to find 60% of the simulated bombs planted on fake travelers.

So, having learned firsthand about the Law of Unintended Consequences, Mica now believes the TSA should be privatized and focus on intelligence, not screening. It is gratifying to witness the economic education of a public servant. The pity is that his tuition cost so much of our treasure and our liberty.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

"We're Letting Mom Go"

Like the very fine film Contagion, which I reviewed earlier this year, The Descendants focuses on a man who must deal with the death of his wife. And, as in Contagion, this man discovers, after the fact, that his wife had been having an affair. The concept gives one pause: if you left the office this afternoon and didn’t make it back home, what secrets would your loved ones discover while trying to put back together the pieces of their lives? Would their memory of you be forever shadowed by some discovery that you were no longer alive to explain?

Although I would never condone an extramarital relationship, I felt sad for both of these cheating characters (especially when I read the book version of The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings). We all wear different labels for different occasions. Yes, Elizabeth King (Patricia Hastie) must wear the label “Adulterer,” but she also wears the label “Mother.” And “Friend.” And “Adventurer.” And “Artist.” And “Wife.” And, apparently, “Neglected Wife.” Is it fair that “Adulterer” is the only one by which she will be remembered?

Matt King (George Clooney) seems to recognize this. He admits in voiceover narration that “before the accident we hadn’t spoken in three days. In a way, we hadn’t spoken in months.” Similarly, he acknowledges that he hasn’t spent time alone with his daughters Scottie (Amanda Miller) and Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) in at least seven years. He’s a busy attorney as well as the executor of a family trust that belongs to the descendants of King Kamehameha of Hawaii. In the latter role he has the responsibility of deciding what to do with a huge parcel of undeveloped land on Kauai before the trust is dissolved in seven years. While his wife lies in a coma, he is trying to decide which of several development offers to accept. This family trust provides a backdrop and metaphor for the family drama unfolding in the foreground.

When Matt discovers — from teenaged Alexandra, no less — that Elizabeth had been cheating on him, he decides to track down her paramour. Not to punch him, mind you, although that thought brings a smile to Matt’s face. Somehow he is able to feel enough love and compassion, and perhaps even guilt, to give his wife and her lover the opportunity to say goodbye. The journey to find the lover becomes, in a sense, a journey for Matt to find himself and, in the process, to change his own label to “Father.”

As he surveys the land that is owned jointly by his cousins, Matt muses, “We didn’t do anything to own this land — it was just entrusted to us.” In a way, this is true of families as well. We fall in love, we get married, and children show up. We don’t do anything to prove that we are ready for them. We don’t have to get a training manual to raise them (yet). But they are entrusted to us nevertheless. Matt goes on to note about the land trust, “We were expected to protect this land. I have seven years left to figure out how to keep it.” His family is like that, too. He is already a father genetically; he has about seven years left to become a father in fact.

Set in Hawaii, The Descendants provides a rustic glimpse of the close-knit, laid-back life of the native Hawaiians who aren’t really all that “native” — many of them are blonde and blue-eyed. One can almost smell the frangipani in the background and feel the warm sidewalks under their bare feet. The art on the walls of the various homes is also uniquely Hawaiian, creating a visual luau of colors and designs. It is a lovely film in every respect.

As is usually the case, however, the novel on which the film is based has more depth than the screenplay. Film adaptations always have to take shortcuts to fit the story inside the movie’s limited time structure, and character development often suffers in the process. While The Descendants is a good film, I missed the nuances that come out in the book, where we see more of Elizabeth, her background, her motivation, and the joy and tragedy of her life than we do in the film.

Several years ago, some new acquaintances told me their “how we met” story. John had been married to Mary’s sister Kathleen, and when Kathleen contracted cancer, Mary came to help nurse her and take care of their children. On the way home from Kathleen’s funeral, one of the children volunteered from the backseat, “Aunt Mary, can you be our new mommy?” And that is what happened. John and Mary thought this was a wonderfully happy and romantic story. From their perspective it is. But my heart went out to Kathleen. On the way home from the funeral? They couldn’t mourn her and let her be the mommy for just a little while longer?

I thought of that story as I watched Matt become a father to his daughters. After the doctor tells Matt that there isn't any hope for Elizabeth's recovery, Matt says to ten-year-old Scottie, "We're letting Mom go tomorrow." He says it matter-of-factly, almost as he might say, "We're letting the maid go" or, "We're letting the gardener go." The Neglected Wife became the Adulterer, and "Mother" is erased from her resume. I was happy for Matt and his daughters to have rekindled their bond. But my heart ached for Elizabeth. It made me want to go home and throw away all my secrets.

Crony College Capitalism

In several earlier articles in this journal, I began examining the theory and practice of crony capitalism — that peculiar form of statism that ostensibly embraces free enterprise, while arranging for government to control the major economic enterprises by means of its favored supporters (its “cronies”). I suggested that this form of statism is common in failed socialist states, such as Russia, and neo-socialist ones, such as the United States.

Much attention has been paid, by me and others, to the crony car and crony green energy capitalism so artfully practiced by the current administration. But there are many other flavors of crony capitalism. In a recent piece, for example, I touched on what you might call the Obama regime’s crony drug capitalism. Now let’s turn to a flavor that isn’t often noticed. It is what we might term “crony college capitalism.”

Besides studying Saul Alinsky, President Obama has apparently studied Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist who urged his fellow Marxists to go into education, the better to turn regular schools into training grounds for future radicals. Since its earliest days, the Obama regime has been concerned with extending its power in the realm of college education, giving economic rewards to college teachers and students, who are overwhelmingly Obama supporters.

The working class was once a mainstay of the Democratic Party coalition. The new Democratic Party will consist of statist-inclined college educated groups.

Indeed, a recent piece in the New York Times suggests that Obama’s reelection campaign strategy now explicitly recognizes that it has to give up the white working class, except the tiny 7% that is unionized, hence able to contribute largely to the campaign. The working class was once a mainstay of the Democratic Party coalition. The new Democratic Party will consist of statist-inclined college educated groups such as professors, teachers, school and college administrators, therapists, lawyers, librarians, social workers, artists and designers, and their numerous dependents, along with key ethnic minorities.

You can see this calculation at play in Obama’s recent decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. The decision cost tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs, but it mightily pleased the environmental lobby, disproportionately college educated folks of statist mindset.

The tactics the Regime is using to corrupt higher education policy for its own benefit are the same it has used elsewhere: identify cronies, expand the size and scope of federal subsidies to them, and expand the size and scope of regulation to attack the cronies’ competitors. More succinctly, the Regime’s crony capitalist game in higher education is — as it is everywhere else — one of rewarding supporters and attacking their (and hence its) enemies.

Start with the rewards for the cronies. One of the Regime’s major “educational” initiatives was its socialization of the student loan industry, which happened just two years ago. A troika of key Regime players — Obama, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) — ended private funding of government-backed student loans (the most common student loans), under the theory that the private lenders (read: banks) were greedy, i.e., only after profits, and not truly interested in helping students achieve a decent education. Government, of course, is run by people incapable of greed, and motivated entirely by their concern for others.

The scheme included the usual outrageous accounting trick. Sympathetic congressmen claimed that by nationalizing student loans, they would “save” $87 billion over 11 years. In the same way, nationalizing GM and Chrysler has “saved” billions, and Obamacare will “save” even more. At the time, the CBO had dutifully scored the savings at $87 billion, but the Director of the CBO, Douglas Elmendorf, had signaled Congress (in a letter to Senator Judd Gregg) that the scoring did not reflect the risk that defaults could be higher than projected. But the Regime pushed its phantom “savings” with a straight face. It even used them to write down part of the costs of Obamacare and justify an expansion of educational Pell Grants (about which more below).

You can see this calculation at play in Obama’s recent decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, a decision that cost tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs.

A posteriori experience from the student loan nationalization confirms what a priori economic reasoning would naturally suggest: the government generally runs things less efficiently than the private sector does. The Department of Education now reports that the default rate on student loans has surged by about one-fourth, from 7% in 2008 to 8.8% in 2009. Worse, because of another government accounting trick, these figures are deceptively low. The government loan program has options that allow some students to pay less that they really owe (these options are euphemistically called “income contingent” and “income based” repayment plans).

Besides rewarding its likely supporters with student loans, the Regime moved to expand the Pell Grant program — to double its funding, in fact. And it is resisting the efforts by the Republicans in the House of Representatives to rein in the program by requiring that recipients have a high school diploma or GED(!).

As a consequence of these policies, and the fact that in deciding who gets student loans the government doesn’t bother looking at the students’ assets or credit histories, the aggregate amount of college student debt has risen dramatically — up by 25% over the past three years, a time, please note, during which Americans generally reduced their personal debt load by 9%. Student debt now exceeds total consumer credit card debt. It now tops $1 trillion.

Of course, the Regime has revealed a solution for the problem it helped so much to create. It proposes to roll forward a law that helps college students mitigate and even get out of their student loan debts. Under current law, students must make monthly payments of 15% of discretionary income, with the balance of their loans forgiven after 25 years. (“Forgiven” means, of course, that the taxpayer eats the remaining cost of a college degree that mainly benefits the degree holder personally.) A law passed by Congress in 2010 and scheduled to take effect in 2014 will drop payments to 10%, with the balance of the loan forgiven after 20 years. Obama now wants this to take effect starting next year — which just happens to be his re-election year.

This is all on top of an existing program that allows students who enter “public service” (read: students who go to work for government or other nonprofit agencies — both areas in which employees tend overwhelmingly to vote Democrat) to have their loans forgiven after only 10 years. All of these “forgiveness” programs are projected to cost the treasury $575 million a year — quite unforgiving for the taxpayer.

Moreover, Obama is now proposing that students be able to combine their older (pre-Regime-takeover), federally-backed private loans together with the new government loans under a new lower interest as well as under the new rules.

All this is obviously aimed at buying the votes of all college students, but especially appealing to the ones whose degrees — say, in social studies, humanities, ethnic studies, women’s studies, and so on — make it likely they won’t earn high enough salaries to pay off the loans in 20 years.

Of course, complete student loan debt forgiveness is a prominent demand of the Occupy Wall Street protesters (those foot-soldiers of the welfare state so conspicuously embraced by the Regime), and a sizable proportion of students generally. One “We the People” petition on the White House website calling for total student loan forgiveness already has more than 32,000 signatures, and a similar petition on “SignOn.org” has garnered 640,000 signatures. You can bet Obama is after those votes.

Government, of course, is run by people incapable of greed, and motivated entirely by their concern for others.

How has the higher education business reacted to the increased amount of money it can now extract from students — because the higher education business can now extract more from government? The reaction has been predictable, from the economic point of view. Colleges have dramatically increased their tuition and fees. The costs of higher education have risen even faster than the costs of health care, which is widely viewed — even by the Regime — as out of control. Lavish funding for students has college administration and staff — another of the Regime’s core constituencies.

A recent report shows that just year, in-state tuition and fees for four-year public universities jumped by 8.3% on average, to a new high of $8,244. Private colleges saw tuition and fees jump by 4.5% on average to a new high of $28,500. (The state universities, at least, had to contend with a cutback of state support.)

The notion that increased federal funding of higher education has fueled its explosive growth in costs is the focus of a fine report by Neal McCluskey and Vance Fried, put out by the Cato Institute. The authors point out that profits at colleges — public and private, for-profit and non-profit — have escalated during the past three decades. They calculate the current costs in two different ways. They first is the “buildup" method, in which the researcher adds up all the input costs — professors’ compensation, administrators’ compensation, utility costs, etc. The second is the “internal accounting” method, which uses the actual accounting numbers furnished by colleges (numbers that few states make available, if you are talking about public colleges).

The authors find that both methods yield roughly the same result, about $8,000 a year at an average residential college.

Tuition figures are readily available. Using 2008 figures, tuition for a full-time student averages about $13,500 at a private 4-year college. This is a profit of $5,500 per student — or about a 40% margin. Add in charitable donations into the college endowment targeted for teaching, and the profit margin is even higher.

Moreover, they estimate that the margins at public universities are roughly the same, when you factor in the state subsidies (paid by the taxpayers) along with the tuition (paid by the students and their parents).

The high profit margins are the result of colleges jacking up their charges over the past 30 years. McCluskey and Fried note that even in constant dollars (i.e., correcting for inflation), average tuition and fees have gone up 300% during that time.

In what other industry do you see this sort of price inflation? On the contrary, in private industry, (real) price reduction is the norm. Prices of computers — even prices for laser eye surgery — have dropped dramatically over the years. But in the massively subsidized college business, which has seen its direct government subsidies — as well as the subsidies given to students — rise dramatically, price gouging has become the norm. The authors note that federal aid to students has gone up by an astounding 400% over the last three decades.

As the ever-prescient Glenn Reynolds recently put it, “When the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can. Colleges are no exception.”

Why is it not obvious to the average taxpayer that college costs are exploding precisely because of the generosity of that selfsame taxpayer? I confess that I find this psychological mystery even more interesting than the economic issues I have been addressing.

Certainly, part of the problem is the rational ignorance spoken about in public choice theory: ordinary citizens are being screwed by greedy rentseekers, but those citizens remain uninterested, because of the asymmetry of self-interest involved. Each one of them loses only a relatively small amount of assets, while the rentseekers in the higher-ed business stand to make out like bandits. Even now, after the massive increase in federal and state funding of our increasingly dysfunctional K-12 public schools system, and its colossal and consequent failure (as evinced on international tests), the public is reluctant to institute deep changes, such as universal school choice.

The default rate on student loans has surged by about one-fourth, from 7% in 2008 to 8.8% in 2009. Worse, these figures are deceptively low.

Besides the normal rational ignorance of citizens, however, I suspect another reason. People who are usually critically aware have their senses dulled by the very concept of “nonprofit” institutions. I notice this phenomenon in my business ethics classes. It seems almost analytically true to the average student (and by extension, the average person) that in a nonprofit business, there should be no “principal-agent” problem. That is, since the people who created the institution are not in it for profit — unlike the despicable money-grubbers in private industry — their employees must also be devoted solely to delivering the service that the principals intended, instead of ministering to their own self-interests.

In the case of public and nonprofit private colleges, the service to be rendered is primarily student education (and to a lesser degree, research for the benefit of the people generally). The principals are the founders (in the case of private colleges), the taxpayers (in the case of public colleges), the donors, and the students (and parents) who pay tuition. The principals expect the agents — the college professors, administrators, and staffs — to work to achieve the service goals of the principals.

But the principal-agent problem (which is the problem of getting self-interested agents to do what is intended by the principals) is no less acute when the principals are presumed to be altruistic (as are the taxpayers and donors) than when the principals are themselves clearly self-interested (as are the owners of a for-profit business).

What the agents of the nonprofits typically do is just what the agents of profit-seeking enterprises do — continuously seek to expand their compensation, while diminishing their workload. They try for smaller classes, higher salaries, better retirement packages, more grants, fancier equipment, plusher offices, more research assistants, more student aides, more secretaries, more assistant deans, more time off, more holidays, more sabbaticals, more time attending professional conferences, and easier tenure requirements.

I have noted elsewhere one manifestation of this phenomenon: the explosion of the number of college administrators. Not only has the number of administrators at nonprofit colleges gone up, their pay has, too. For instance, in a major piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out that 36 nonprofit colleges had compensation packages well over $1 million in 2009. In its survey of 519 private nonprofit colleges, the Chronicle found that the median total compensation was $385,000.

This delusion that nonprofits are immune from greed helps explain the flip side of crony college capitalism, the Regime’s war against for-profit colleges, institutions that the Regime’s supporters in the academy universally despise.

The Regime has conducted a long, deliberate struggle with these colleges (especially chains such as Westwood College and National University). When the Regime controlled Congress, the attack took the form of “hearings” into the biggest chains. The “hearings” were essentially show-trials, exposing the for-profit colleges for being, well, profit-seeking. The people in charge obviously thought — or pretended to think — that the colleges were inferior, and sought out cases of consumers who claimed to have been harmed by being students there. These testifiers told sad tales of running up large loans getting worthless degrees.

In the massively subsidized college business, which has seen its direct government subsidies rise dramatically, price gouging has become the norm.

This sham show was just polemical tactics. The congressmen on the attack never once called students from public and nonprofit private colleges to testify about the student debts that they had run up while pursuing degrees that never got them jobs. I mean, it’s not as if we couldn’t find students who had accumulated big debts at, say, a California state university (where the presidents sometimes earn salaries in the $400,000 range) to acquire degrees in various unemployable subjects — women’s studies, say, or sociology. The Regime could have found plenty of such “victims,” of this I can assure you.

But a crony capitalist jihad — like any other jihad — is always directed at one group on behalf of another group, to wit, the cronies who inspire and sometimes fund the jihadists.

In crony college capitalism, these are primarily unions, especially teachers’ unions (and allied guilds, such as the American Association of University Professors). These cronies despise for-profit colleges, not merely on philosophic grounds, but because their faculties are non-unionized. To put this simply: they fear the growth of these enterprises in the way that Teamsters fear the expansion of Wal-Mart. For example, the AAUP has strongly attacked for-profit colleges, and called for dramatically increasing regulation of them.

The cronies don't care whether there is any greater pattern of "abuse" at for-profit colleges than at supposedly eleemosynary ones. If they wanted to find that out, they could do detailed observational studies that ruled out confounding variables (by correcting for ethnicity, income-level, and asset bases of parents, SAT scores, and high-school GPA), and see whether similar graduates from for-profit colleges fared any worse on the job market than graduates of nonprofits.

Also in the attack on for-profit colleges are trial lawyers. One notorious example is Florida attorney Chris Hoyer, who is suing Westwood College now, and looking at suing at least seven other for-profit colleges. Hoyer is a donor to the Regime, of course.

Naturally, however, the Regime’s Department of Education has plans to strengthen regulations governing for-profit colleges — yet another way of aggrandizing the federal government, at the expense of yet another part of the economy.

We can put an ironic cap on this discussion by noting a recent report out of the House of Representatives. It points out that over the past decade, while tuition has increased 4.5% at nonprofit private schools, and a whopping 8% at public colleges, it has gone up only 3.2% at for-profit colleges. This competitive edge would be reason enough for the Regime's desire to protect its cronies.

For the record, I think the government-backed student loan program should simply be ended. It is encouraging students to take on debt for degrees that have a dubious payoff, and creating thereby a massive moral hazard: a constituency of people who want to burn the taxpayer by not paying back the loans in full. Moreover, these government loans help inflate college costs pointlessly for all students.

Instead, let all college loans be between private lenders and individuals, with no tax dollars at risk, and with self-interested lenders using their judgment in lending money, knowing that if they loan to incompetent students or for unusable degrees, they may find that the students can’t pay and will discharge the debt in bankruptcy.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

Social Security

My father’s siblings were an eccentric bunch. Born and bred in Brooklyn, they had a very peculiar perspective on the world. None of them ever learned to drive or talked on the phone. They seldom watched TV but lived by the clock, obsessively timing their every move down to the minute — meals, drinks, constitutionals, shopping, reading, waking and sleeping. They minutely measured every quantity that affected them — the volume of their hamburgers (a 50-cent piece), the number of cans of creamed corn in the pantry (4), the size of the jigger of gin in their drinks (1 oz.), the number of daily drinks (3 — plus a Ballantine’s Ale at lunch and a 6 oz. glass of Cribari Red with dinner), the length of their walks (10 blocks), etc.

Ken, the oldest, for some unknown reason, wasn’t fond of black people. But after his wife of 35 years passed away, he married a Japanese mail order bride and adopted two Korean orphans. The gambit forever severed his relationship with his first set of offspring.

Ruth, the only sister, moved in with the other three bachelor brothers — Wallace, Arthur, and Stanley — when her marriage fell apart. Wallace, a chain-smoking aesthete, wrote volumes of poetry and literary criticism, yet never held a job — an attitude vaguely reflected in his politics: he was a progressive social democrat whose ideal society, he quietly enthused, was realized under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. He kept a secret stash of mild pornography in his closet.

Arthur, the youngest, lived under a tiny cloud of shame no one ever alluded to. A Teamster stevedore, he’d once had one drink too many and passed out on a park bench on his way home. Other than tending the siblings’ elaborate truck garden, he never worked again. On walks to the grocery store he’d stop to turn over upside-down beetles.

Stanley, a diminutive stockbroker with coke-bottle glasses, supported the household. He and Wallace had served their country during WWII in noncombatant roles. Stanley had once been engaged, but when his fiancée broke off the engagement without an explanation, he was heartbroken and disillusioned, and always remained that way. Upon retirement, and after Ruth’s death, the remaining brothers moved to a small town in eastern Colorado, where they lived very frugally except for the weekly visit of a cleaning gal.

Stanley and I kept up a weekly correspondence, mostly a running commentary on politics and current events. One day I received a letter informing me that the cleaning lady had altered a $100 payment check to read $1,000, cashed it, and disappeared. Stanley, who budgeted their affairs down to the penny, said that the theft — along with the rampant inflation of the 1970s — had reduced their finances to below a sustainable level. Could I help them out with a monthly stipend?

It must have been a tough letter to write.

I did — and enlisted my brother and sisters in the project. When my mother found out, she complained that the uncles refused to collect their Social Security checks. It was a matter of principle to them: even though they had paid into the system, they perceived it as welfare — not something they wanted to participate in (except for Wallace, I presume, who may not have paid anything into the system). Despite all that, I never questioned their decision, and continued to send a monthly check.

When Arthur passed away, Stanley turned down my offer to visit and help out. It would, he said — in the only phone conversation I ever had with him — “disrupt their routine too much.” When Wallace died, Stanley again begged off. He died in 1995 at the age of 86.

Last month, in anticipation of turning 62 before the year’s end, I visited my local Social Security office to help determine whether it was better to collect early benefits or wait until I turned 65. Unlike my uncles, I have no qualms about collecting from a system that I’m forced to pay into. I passed a security check, took a number, and patiently waited my turn. When it came, I got a totally unexpected surprise, untempered by any introductory foreplay: I was told that unless I paid another 20 quarters worth of taxes into the system, I would not qualify for any Social Security benefits.

Now, I’ve worked all my life (and continue to do so), and have always paid all my taxes assiduously (though not all of my income was subject to Social Security taxes). I've paid nearly $17,000 into the “compact between generations” (as the Social Security Administration phrases it). I figured my “investment” would be worth at least $80 a month. In spite of knowing that government programs never live up to their promise, I’d never considered that I would be outside the receiving end of Social Security benefits.

What might I have done with those $17,000 I’d paid in over the years? Or with the thousands in stipends I sent my uncles in lieu of their Social Security checks?

Who knows? But I am certain of one thing: I will not throw good money after bad.

About this AuthorAnonymous is a retired spec home builder living somewhere out west.

Invoking TR

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt went to Kansas and made one of his “square deal” speeches, promising to give the little guy a fair shake. The same theme had inspired much of his popularity as president during the preceding decade.

In 2011 Barack Obama went to Kansas and invoked Roosevelt in a speech promoting higher taxes on wealthy folks to pay for more government spending on education and “infrastructure.” He too called for a square deal, but with less colorful language. He preferred the word “fair,” as in "pay your fair share."

After Teddy had provided a “square deal” for seven years, federal spending as a percentage of GDP was under 10%.

After Barack had provided his for three years, federal government spending as a percentage of GDP was about 40%.

Couldn’t we just settle for more than twice the fairness that Teddy demanded, by cutting the government in half?

About this AuthorMichael Christian is a recovering lawyer trying to avoid working a real job.

Waste Not

In Japan, you discover ways of economizing that are entirely different from ours. Tokyo is one of the largest cities in the world, but in this place, unlike Hong Kong, the people do not all live in apartments. Most of Tokyo is a sea of single-family houses — and different houses, each one individual. The Japanese manage this by cramming them together, with no yard to speak of. They will often have a place to shoehorn a car, and always right at the edge of the property. They don’t waste real estate on driveways, at least not where I was.

The streets, too, save space. Where I stayed in the suburb of Kichijoji, there were no shoulders and no parking on the street. The arterials had sidewalks separated from the road by a railing. The side streets had no sidewalks and no lawns — just streets and houses, crammed tight. But if the alternative is to have a cave in the sky with lots of open space below, the Tokyo way is certainly more comfortable for an individualist.

I had a question, though: If you have a party, where do the guests park their cars? I forgot to ask my host and never did figure it out. In Hong Kong, where people live in tiny apartments, if you want a big party, you rent a room at a hotel.

Across the street from the house where my family and I stayed was a city park where people picnicked and walked their dogs. It was big. In the midst of it my host pointed out a fenced-off area about the size of a family garden back in the States. There was no garden in this enclave; it was unkempt. But it was private. In Japan, my host explained, private owners can’t be compelled to sell, so the property sits there, in this case unused.

The Japanese are big on recycling. My host has several rooms full of stuff he’d like to get rid of, and there is no easy way to do it. “You can’t just take it to the dump,” he said. Sometimes he sneaks stuff into the dumpsters in the park across the street.

In this park, however, I saw no trash cans other than the dumpsters at the food concession. In my short time in Japan, I was constantly looking for a trash can. They were not to be had — yet the Japanese do not throw garbage on the ground. What do they do with it? Do they carry it with them? Did the people I passed on the street have a stash of crumpled-up wrappers in their purses and pockets?

The Japanese are also fastidious about their dogs. I thought we had reached the apex of fastidiousness in Seattle, where dog owners pick up their pets’ poops from the ground by reaching for it through a plastic bag. In the park in Japan, I saw a woman do one better. She was holding a plastic bag under her dog in anticipation.

About this Author

Bruce Ramsey is a retired newspaperman who lives in Seattle. He is author of Unsanctioned Voice, a biography of journalist Garet Garrett.

A Living Wage?

Ever since Fidel Castro’s retirement from all official positions of power in Cuba in 2008, and his brother Raul’s accession to the presidency, the island and its concerned neighbors, trading partners, assorted NGOs, and inquiring observers have been atwitter with the possibility of “hope and change” erupting.

Throughout this period, dominated by much informed speculation about the course of future events but overshadowed by the ever-present ball-and-chain of the still-living Fidel — the "conscience" of the Revolution — I have tried to separate the wheat from the chaff for Liberty’s readers. The winnowing has included accounts of the official transfer of power, the character of Raúl (according to his sister’s memoir), quotidian life on the island, the role of corruption, evolving US policy, and even Fidel’s admission, in a Gramma editorial, that yes, mistakes had been made.

But the big news has always been the projected microeconomic reforms and the ministerial-level reforms where grandiose plans for investments through joint venture agreements between foreign corporations and the regime are being concocted.

Well, Galluseconomicus is slowly slouching homeward, with an eye to roosting.

Self-employment in over 180 professions is now legal — though with some restrictions and paperwork. Last month, the buying and selling of homes and cars also became legal (as per above). The biggest splash is being made by the 3,000 executives from over 60 countries, prospective joint commercial enterprisers, at Havana’s annual trade fair last month. But that splash has overflown the verge of the little pool and is soaking an awful lot of people.

According to The Economist, several foreign managers have been arrested and three joint ventures have been closed. One British and two Canadian executives have been held for questioning without charge, the former for over one month and the other two for several months. “Perhaps,” the article speculates, “because some of these steps are controversial, he [Raúl] is also cracking down on corruption, which the cash-strapped state can no longer afford to fund.” Since the government never set up tender guidelines for its corporate partners, kickbacks for contracts are rife. But rumors of the allegations extend way beyond bribery and push the definition of "corruption" into territory it is only now exploring.

In an era when foreign corporate investment in third world countries is subject to the scrutiny of such fuzzy concepts as “a living wage” and “social justice,” used to criticize pay scales based on local customs (pay scales that often provide income for people who might not otherwise be employed, that are perfectly legal and welcome, and that produce a product affordable to a wider audience), Cuba is adding a new and thought-provoking twist to the debate.

Some of Cuba’s new foreign venture partners, in an effort to attract dedicated employees and avoid meddling outside criticism, are sweetening employee contracts with bonuses and perks, such as extra-tasty lunches. Unfortunately, the Cuban government requires firms to hire workers through a state employment agency that pays meager salaries. Any remuneration above state mandated levels is considered corrupt. Some of the foreign managers’ arrests and joint venture closures, according to the rumored allegations, are attributed to the "overcompensation" of employees.

If you truly want to help the poorest coffee growers, stick with the “exploitation coffee.”

But the door swings both ways. Cuba’s comptroller general has had dozens of employees in the sugar, mining, telecom, and tobacco industries jailed for graft. For Castro, developed world market wages are a step too far. One European businessman, who pays bonuses to his entire local staff under the table, says, “My people help run a business which brings in millions of dollars to Cuba. I need to pay them a salary which is rather more than the price of a taxi ride home.”

Aside from the health consequences of exercise vs. smoking, which is the greater evil: Nike's legal and welcome $1.25-a-day Indonesian wage to sub-adult employees for the manufacture of athletic shoes, or another international corporation’s illegal and prosecuted near-first-world compensation to Cuban tobacco workers?

One irony is that the debate about "sweatshop" economics has mostly been settled. Even Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman states in a 1997 article for Slate that “as manufacturing grows in poor countries, it creates a ripple effect that benefits ordinary people. ‘The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise.' In time average wages creep up to a level comparable to minimum-wage jobs in the United States.” Similarly, economist Jeffrey Sachs said, "My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few."

“Fair trade (coffee) sells a premium product at a premium price, under the premise that the workers are treated better and paid more. It sounds so nice. But will those purchases benefit the poor?

“It depends. How about a product called “exploitation coffee”? You pay less, and they promise to treat the workers especially poorly. That wording is a less effective marketing ploy, but that is what the concept of fair trade boils down to. Whether we upgrade one option or downgrade the other is just semantics. We can either have two classes of coffee (and workers), or one class of coffee and workers. Splitting up the market into classes is good for the workers at the higher end, but it does not always help workers at the lower end. In fact it may hurt them. The jury remains out on this idea.”

My idea is, if you truly want to help the poorest coffee growers, stick with the “exploitation coffee” (without promising to treat them "especially poorly"). The more you buy, the more they earn. The greater the demand, the higher the price will rise and the better off they’ll become.

But the biggest irony in the Cuban government’s wage depression and generosity prosecution is its complete obliviousness to basic and current economic theory. It is truly pushing the dismal science’s frontiers into terrain that no one has ever explored before.

About this Author

Robert H. Miller is a builder, outdoor adventure guide, and author of Kayaking the Inside Passage: A Paddler's Guide from Olympia, Washington to Muir Glacier, Alaska, as well as the forthcoming memoir Closing the Circle: A Memoir of Cuba, Exile, the Bay of Pigs and a Trans-Island Bike Journey, available from Cognitio Books in June 2017.

The Impact of It All

So many Niagaras of words have flowed from the Penn State sex scandal that, unpleasant though the task may be — and it is plenty unpleasant — Word Watch needs to comment on them.

There’s no good place to start, so let’s just dive into the notorious email that Penn State Athletic Flunky Mike McQueary sent to a friend, denying that he had failed to take action when he (allegedly) saw Very Important Coach Jerry Sandusky having sex with a young boy in the showers at the football building:

“I did stop it, not physically . . . but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room . . . I did have discussions with police and with the official at the university in charge of police . . . no one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30–45 seconds . . . trust me.”

Surely Mike McQueary deserves a promotion. The language of this note is much more appropriate to a university administrator than to a low-level munchkin. First, there’s the strong assertion (“I did stop it”); then there’s the telling admission (“not physically”); then there’s that curious kind of statement that makes one pause, read it again, and speculate about what it really means, without ever knowing how one could tell if one had actually found the meaning.

“Made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room.” Does that mean you really, personally stopped it? If so, how? But maybe you mean that you let it go on, but when you went back and checked, you found it had stopped, possibly because of whatever it was you did, or didn’t do, before. Is that it? Should we ask for the floor plans, so we can see where the locker room was, in relation to the showers? Was the interval between the time when you saw something happening in the shower and the time when you left the locker room the same as “those 30–45 seconds”? Or what?

But the thing that really puts McQueary in the higher administrative or political realm is his chain of self-references: “No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes . . . . trust me.”

On this one matter, I do trust him. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. But I can well imagine his thoughtswhen he was confronted with the need to protect a child from sexual abuse by a high-ranking operative of the “educational” institution he worked for. I believe he was thinking, “Damn! This is gonna get me fired!”

How does a bunch of college kids marching around with candles make anyone feel better about having been molested?

That thick vein of self-regard, and the obfuscating style that is its inseparable companion, runs into McQueary’s next remarks: “I am getting hammered for handling this the right way . . . or what I thought at the time was right . . .” Silly me. I thought this mindless jock was “getting hammered” for doing something wrong. Now I have to consider the possibility that he thought he was right. Gosh. What about that? I guess if he thought he was right, I’ll have to feel sorry for him. Won’t I? Won’t you?

Uh, maybe not, but it was a good try, planting that logic tree: either he’s right — or he’s wrong, but in that case he’s right anyway, because he thought he was right. . . .

The McQueary statement that galls me most, however, is the following: “I had to make tough impacting quick decisions.” Fascinating — what were those decisions? I would like to know. Once more, either he did something right, or he did something he thought was right — but what was it? Whatever it may have been, it was “quick” (45 seconds? In 45 seconds you can get halfway through the Gettysburg Address), “tough” (on whom?), and “impacting” (again, on whom?). Apparently it wasn’t especially impacting on Coach Sandusky, or on Penn State University, or on its head football coach, or on its president, or on McQueary himself, or on anyone else involved in this mess. All of them went on their merry way, for the next nine years. One imagines that McQueary’s decision might at least have been impacting on McQueary. But what was the impact? No one knows. Nonetheless, McQueary wants everyone to care and sympathize.

Sadly, impact is not just a flunkeyism. Itis the word of choice for all those high-class people who specialize in, well, impacting public opinion. First marketed to congressmen and corporate CEOs, it soon passed to all other professionals, including professional educators such as McQueary and his associates. The Penn State scandal alone has registered as many impacts as the surface of the moon.

We are all impacted now, and no one more than The Second Mile, the organization for disadvantaged kids that Sandusky founded, and which he reputedly used as a means of identifying his sexual targets. On Nov. 6, soon after the scandal broke, Second Mile canceled a fundraising event, explaining, “While we are providing our children’s programming as scheduled, The Second Mile has decided, out of respect and compassion for all impacted by the allegations from the Attorney General’s office, to postpone The Second Mile’s Reverse Drawing . . .” If you push your way through this thicket of words, you will discover that what has made an “impact” on the unspecified “all” isn’t any actions of Sandusky himself but simply the force of the Attorney General’s “allegations” about such actions.

Coupled with this announcement was a carefully worded narrative intended to exculpate The Second Mile. It started with the all and impact boilerplate: “Our prayers, care and compassion go out to all impacted.” I suppose that includes the leadership of Second Mile, people who have certainly been impacted, if not deprived of their jobs, by the events in question. But in their case, prayer has been unavailing. Eight days after the message just quoted, the organization’s CEO resigned, modestly stipulating that any further statement on his part would take “the focus from where it should be — on the children, young adults and families who have been impacted. Their pain and their healing is the greatest priority, and my thoughts and prayers have been and will continue to be with them.”

In other words, he’s not talking. But this word impacted . . . it’s a curious expression. It used to mean that something had smashed into something else, and the latter had been seriously damaged, perhaps destroyed. Now, under the influence of obfuscating politicians, officious or embarrassed educators, and illiterate journalists, impacted can mean anything within the range of “affected in some way.” Dude! Your beagle is impacting my front lawn. Dude.

Surely, kids who have been seduced or molested by sex-greedy adults have been seriously impacted, but the more you use that word, the less it means. The image of a crater, or a tooth in trouble, seems less significant, and less humane, the more you hear it applied to humans. It’s an easy word, isn’t it? No one can claim that you aren’t caring enough, if you use such an emphatic term. Especially when you couple it with a standard reference to thoughts and prayers.

I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but when I tell someone that he is in my thoughts and prayers, I mean that I am actually thinking about him and praying for him. That’s simple enough. But what do you think is happening when the normal public figure says that people are in his thoughts and prayers? Do you believe that presidents respond to earthquakes, plane crashes, droughts, floods, and deaths in battle by actually thinking and praying about those who have been impacted? They say they do, but I don’t think they’re telling the truth.

He was patiently bemused by the stupidity of the young.

Listening to this jargon, I picture the president abruptly leaving his golf games, lobbyist shakedowns, and reelection strategy sessions to rush up to the family quarters and kneel in prayer on behalf of every person endangered by all those floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and military defeats about which he has publicly extended his thoughts and prayers during the past 24 hours. That’s what we’re supposed to imagine, isn’t it?

I don’t deny that even a president may sometimes pray, and pray for someone other than himself. Many presidents have done that. Until recently, however, they haven’t made so many confessions that they are always busy thinking and praying about people in the news. Every religious person should oppose such pretense at piety, instead of leaving it for the atheists to ridicule. One reason why this is especially important to debunk is that the hypocrisy of the official class has a way of seeping down, like fluids escaping from a corpse, into the language of everyone else. In other words, as President Obama would put it, official smarm impacts us all in a negative manner.

On November 11, on Fox News, Juan Williams — a journalist who knows and respects the English language — had the unenviable task of reporting on events at Penn State, where students rioted because the trustees overthrew the local god, Joe Paterno, the head coach who failed to act in the Sandusky case. The insurrection happened just when the university was most vulnerable, facing, as it did, an invasion from Nebraska on the coming Saturday. So after the first night of orgiastic grief, the Penn State patriots decided that smarm was better than violence. Without relinquishing their support for JoPa, they decided to take strong moral action — by holding a candlelight vigil. Huh? Yet this is exactly what you would expect from the disciples of an ersatz religion, such as college football. Light some candles, and everyone will know you’re devout. They may even confuse your worship of fuhbawl with the ceremonies of one of the higher religions.

But let’s see . . . there had to be a vigil, but what would be the point of it? What would it ostensibly be for? Of course, it was “to show support for the children who were allegedly abused” — an interesting use of the word support. One supports a football team by screaming slogans in a stadium. These verbal oblations are assumed to have a magical effect on the prowess of the team. But how does a bunch of college kids marching around with candles make anyone feel better about having been molested?

This question must have occurred to someone besides me, because the vigil organizers got more specific. They said that their show of support was aimed at “raising money for victims of sexual abuse.” That sounds good — but of course, the actual victims weren’t going to receive any of that money. Oh no. Contributions would go to “groups fighting child abuse.” Again, it sounds good. But how do you use money for something like that? Is this how we deal with other crimes? Do we give money to groups fighting burglaries? How about murder — do you think we should donate money to groups fighting that?

Please don’t accuse me of being insensitive to victims of burglary, murder, or any other actual crime. But guess what? We already have an organization that’s designed to fight such crimes, including child abuse; and it is very well funded. We all contribute to its maintenance. That organization is called the police.

Now back to Juan Williams. He had to interview two young women, students at Penn State, who were involved in the mighty candlelight vigil. These young people loved Penn State. They pitied its sorry plight. They viewed it as an innocent lamb, deprived of its shepherd (Joe Paterno). But this religious devotion to alma mater seems to have made them especially vulnerable to leakages of pomposity from the upper administrative levels. When Williams asked one of them a softball starter question, she declined to answer before she had pounded all the rivets into the official boilerplate. “First,” she intoned, “I just want to take a moment to extend my thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families on behalf of myself and all the Penn State family.”

Now President Spanier adds one more to the list of perfect objects. His statement is the ne plus ultra of administrative arrogance.

Williams reacted to this extraordinary statement in the only way in which a courteous gentleman could react: he tried to make sense of what the young woman was saying; then, failing that, he contented himself with a few pacific, grandfatherly remarks, which neither of the students appeared to understand. He was patiently bemused by the stupidity of the young. But for God’s sake, what kind of culture is it that inspires a 20-year-old with the notion that a university is a “family,” that she is empowered, by her proffered feelings, to speak for that “family,” and that she has thereby achieved the sacramental role of thinking and praying over other people, personally unknown to her — on television, yet? Her effortless assumption of the official attitude was bizarre, and unsettling, though hardly unprecedented.

Is this what universities teach? I’m afraid they do.

I should add that Penn State students were advised, at the candlelight vigil, to go to the Nebraska game wearing blue, which for some reason has been identified by someone as the color of “child abuse awareness.” Awareness? Does that word have a meaning? Is there a non-trivial sense in which my awareness of child abuse does something for its victims? In any event, the slogan of the day was, "Stop Child Abuse, Blue Out Nebraska." A strangely assorted pair of sentiments! But yes, the stadium was full of blue on Saturday, though Nebraska was not blued out. Nebraska won.

Winners and losers . . . one sadly revealing episode of the Penn State scandal was college president Graham Spanier’s official statement (Nov. 7) about the arrest of two of his fellow administrators: “The protection of children is of paramount importance. The university will take a number of actions moving forward to increase the safety and security within our facilities and make everyone aware of the protocols in place for handling these issues."

From time to time, it is given to mortals to view a work of human artifice so perfect, in its way, as to lie beyond all analytic criticism. The Taj Mahal. Andrea del Sarto’s “Madonna of the Harpies.”The final movements of Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony. Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poems. Now President Spanier adds one more to the list of perfect objects. His statement is the ne plus ultra of administrative arrogance. One stands in awe of it: it is a perfectly pompous, perfectly empty statement. It is perfect in that way, not because it says nothing at all — it says a lot of things — but because it claims to mean something, and simultaneously withdraws all its purported meanings, thus arriving, in this most challenging of contexts, at the nothingness it pretends to reject.

The university will take actions. What actions? A number of them.

The university will increase safety and security. How? Somehow.

There are protocols in place for handling these issues. What protocols? What issues? What does “issues” mean, anyhow? Never mind; we will make everyone aware.

Meanwhile, we are all moving forward. Does that mean . . . just possibly . . . that there was something wrong in the past, which we are now moving away from? That’s a possibility. Exploring it, however, would ruin the effect.

But here’s the good part. The statement didn’t work. Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno were fired. Of the fallen Dr. Spanier, said to have been the most highly paid university administrator in America, the governor of the state opined: “People lost confidence in [his] ability to lead.”

The word wasn’t “talk.” The word was “lead.” There’s a difference. And no heap of words can cover it up.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

The Golden Years Really Are Golden

A recent AP story caught my eye, since it bears upon an issue on which I have oft written — the coming pension tsunami, caused by the retirement of us Infamous Boomers.

It tells the news about the wealth gap between the Old and the Young. The gap is now the widest in American history. Despite occasional lurid stories about a grandmother eating cat food shortly before being wheeled off a cliff, the wealth gap favors . . . the old!

And the gap is enormous. Census data reveal that households headed by someone 65 or older have an average net worth 47 times greater than that of households headed by someone under 35. The median net worth of households headed by a person 65 or older is about $170,000, compared to a pathetic $3,662 of those headed by someone 34 or younger.

Moreover, the gap continues to widen. It has doubled over the past six years, and has increased fivefold during the past 25 years — even after adjustments are made for inflation. Astonishing, no?

There are a number of reasons for the declining relative fortunes of the young. One is that the Obama recession has totally creamed the young, especially young men. It is not for nothing that this has been called the “he-cession.” Besides that reason (though related to it), is the fact that young people are taking longer and accumulating more debt to get their degrees. And of course others are still paying mortgages on homes that have fallen disastrously in value.

The disparity is bleak, and in a way — considering all the granny-eating-cat-food propaganda — ironic. But the trend is decidedly the friend of the elderly: over the past quarter century, the wealth of households headed by the elderly rose by a whopping 42%, while the wealth of households headed by the young (under 35) declined by a dizzying 68%.

As if that weren’t bad enough, 37% of households headed by the young have a zero or even negative net worth! That is an increase of over 100% since 1984 (when the census first started keeping track of this happy stuff), and it is massive compared to the only 8% of elderly-headed households so cursed. And the median income of elderly-headed households has grown at a rate 400% greater than that for younger-headed households.

Net worth is here defined just as you would expect: by adding the value of homes, personal possessions, stacks, bonds, savings, and other property (such as cars, boats, and vacation properties), and subtracting credit card, auto, home, student loan, and other debts.

Now, how does the AARP — those redistributionist pirates who are always so intent on transferring assets from the young to the elderly — respond to the news that the 47 to 1 gap in net worth favoring the elderly is the highest in history? Of course, it greets it with greedy denial.

One Nancy Holland, a propagandist — pardon me, an executive vice-president — of the AARP puts it in the typical AARP spit-in-your-face-avariciously-aggressive fashion: “Millions of older Americans today continue to struggle to make ends meet. Many older Americans do own their homes, but plummeting housing values — along with dwindling savings, stagnant pensions, and prolonged periods of unemployment — have taken their toll.”

In short, screw the young people. As if their own homes and savings hadn’t been hard by this progressive liberal recession. As if they too hadn’t suffered unemployment. As if they had freaking pensions to rely on!

Our country is, alas, headed into the fiscal dustbin of history. Its aggregate national debt is approaching the dimensions of Greek tragedy, if not of Greece itself. But the AARP continues to wage a jihad against all entitlement program reforms. Future historians — if there are any who aren’t progressive liberals, hence wedded to the ideology of the redistributionist state — will record with incredulity the bizarre structure of a politico-economic system that in defiance of biological reality systematically starved the young to glut the old.

Maybe we need ads showing the grandkids eating cat food as they are pushed from a cliff.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

Who Let the Dog Out?

Police are routinely judged by a different standard, a double standard under the law that allows them to violate the civil liberties protected by the constitution. The police do so with impunity. They can (and they do) get away with murder while the average, non-uniformed person is tossed into jail for forgetting to pay a traffic ticket.

A recent news story from WFMJ (Campbell, Ohio) and the Youngstown Vindicator illustrates how deeply embedded this double standard has become. An “off-duty” police dog was enjoying a walk with his partner when he spotted an 8-year-old boy playing hide-and-seek with his cousin. The dog attacked the running child, dragging him to the ground, shredding his sweatshirt, puncturing his T-shirt and leaving marks on the boy's arm.

What is the police response? They praise the dog's record as a crime-buster and drug-sniffer. No mention is made of sanctioning the police officer or taking the dog off the street. Any other dog would be put down for attacking a child without provocation; any other owner would be liable in civil court. But this dog was excused with the explanation that he could not distinguish between a fleeing suspect and a playing child. In short, the dog was just doing his job.

"They're [police dogs] trained that anything running could be a potential threat, and all he's doing is reacting and doing what he was trained to do," explained Sergeant John Rusnak from the Campbell Police Department. “He has caught three armed robbers. He has located numerous amounts of drugs. He has tracked down suspects. He’s been a vital, vital part of our police department.”

The libetarian commentary site The Agitator makes an interesting observation about the incident: “And if someone had come to the kid’s defense and shot the dog, as on- and off-duty cops routinely do, that person would be in custody right now. Of course, the problem isn’t the dog, it’s the handler. And when cops kill the family pet, the problem also usually isn’t with the dog.”

It is my understanding that no police dog attacks without a verbal command. If I am incorrect, then every police dog out there is a standing menace to every child it encounters. There is no mention of any sanctions or repercussions for the officer who let the dog in question get away. Apparently leash laws do not apply to everyone. As in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Orwell was speaking of swine. So am I.

About this AuthorWendy McElroy is editor of ifeminists.com and author of "The Reasonable Woman."